By Dominic Ashley-Timms and Laura Ashley-Timms
According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), improving the average quality of people management in UK firms by just 7% could add a massive £110bn to the economy. This raises a crucial question – why are current management practices costing businesses so much?
The answer is evident when we look at how managers are – or, more accurately, aren’t – prepared to take on leadership roles. According to the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), 82% of those who enter a management position should be categorised as accidental managers because they’ve received NO formal leadership or management training for their new role.
This lack of training wreaks havoc on organisational performance, particularly employee engagement. According to Gallup, managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, and in 2024, Europe had the lowest regional percentage of engaged employees globally at just 13%. This understandably takes a financial toll on business, as low employee engagement is estimated to cost the global economy 8.9 trillion U.S. dollars, or 9% of global GDP. The UK’s pitiful productivity growth bears out those statistics.
Seeing as only 27% of employees rated their manager as “highly effective” last year, it is vital that businesses invest in improving the quality of their managers to boost organisational performance and reap the financial benefits this brings. So, how can organisations unlock the untapped potential of their managers?
Why management isn’t working
First, let’s examine why current management practices need improvement so badly. When new managers have not been trained to handle the ‘people’ side of leadership, they tend to default to a management style that favours commanding and controlling their team. They dive in to fix and solve staff problems by telling them what to do and measuring their contribution by the problems they’ve managed to solve each day.
Yet when managers constantly step in to solve employee problems, directing their every action on a day-to-day basis, perhaps even micro-managing, they inevitably stifle growth. Employees lose ownership of their work and are robbed of the opportunity to think for themselves, engage appropriately with a task and develop independence within a role. Ultimately, staff become demotivated and disengaged by their lack of advancement.
This prevailing ‘command-and-control’ approach just isn’t sustainable for the future of work, particularly when it comes to cultivating the next generation of leaders. If managers just tell staff what to do without taking a vested interest in their advancement, how can staff find a deeper sense of purpose in their work? How will they be encouraged to step up, take on more responsibility and want to climb the leadership ladder?
According to Deloitte, this is especially relevant with Gen Z employees, 86% of whom say that “having a sense of purpose in their work” is very important. In 2025, McKinsey estimates that a quarter of the workforce will be Gen Z. Hence, it’s critical right now that organisations adopt an alternative approach to management that encourages purposeful work, development and advancement if they’re to grow productivity and strengthen their leadership pipeline.
Why coaching isn’t working
A popular solution for organisations to tackle this prevailing ‘command-and-control’ style is to help them develop coaching skills. The approach seems logical – creating a coaching culture will provide staff with more support and guidance, thus improving performance. Yet despite businesses investing billions into coaching skills training, an overwhelming number of employees are still disengaged and find their managers to be ineffective.
This is because the coaching models being taught to managers are all Executive Coaching models like GROW, reinforcing the idea that coaching should follow a structured, sit-down conversation. These Manager-as-Coach-type training courses all teach time-starved managers how to conduct coaching sessions. Realistically, though, work just isn’t made up of a series of sit-down, one-to-one conversations. What managers learn doesn’t align with the dynamics of busy workplaces, meaning skills quickly become neglected.
Moreover, executive coaching models are designed to pursue the coachee’s agenda, which is rather uncomfortable for a manager trying to coach a direct report for whom they have an agenda of their own. This combination of not-fit-for-purpose training and the subsequent mental models about what coaching is have together inhibited the recognition of coaching as a management practice in its own right. Rather than doing coaching sessions, what’s needed is an approach that encourages managers to change their behaviour and be able to use coaching skills.
Operational Coaching® – An enquiry-led approach
So, what can organisations do differently to build on the benefits of coaching whilst making it relevant and actionable for time-pressed and overburdened managers? To truly transform the quality of management, the focus of new skill acquisition needs to shift away from learning the transactional what of coaching (based on holding episodic coaching sessions) towards more of the how – the behavioural aspects that can underpin a coaching mindset that managers can learn to adopt every day, in the flow of work.
Operational Coaching® overturns the command-and-control style by helping managers stop firefighting and instead adopt an enquiry-led approach. Managers develop their situational awareness to identify coachable moments throughout the day where asking powerful questions might drive a better outcome from a team member’s query than simply solving their problem outright. A well-intentioned question from a manager can help employees wrestle with the issue, developing their independent problem-solving skills and increasing their engagement and sense of fulfilment at work.
This new approach isn’t just a nice idea – it’s been proven to supercharge the quality of management in a large-scale randomised control trial sponsored by the UK government and conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE). Implemented in 62 organisations across 14 sectors, the results proved that those managers who used an Operational Coaching® style of management improved their capabilities across all nine competencies measured. They also spent, on average, an astonishing 70% more time than the control group coaching their team members in the flow of everyday work. Almost half (48%) of the reported successes were related to increased engagement and productivity and generated an average 74x return on investment per manager.
Conclusion
Choosing to invest in improving the quality of management in line with this fresh Operational Coaching® approach not only tackles the immediate issue of employee engagement it also ensures that organisations aren’t leaving talent on the table. Enabling line managers and leaders with the modern engagement and communication skills needed to draw on the talents of a multigenerational workforce is an economic imperative. Those organisations that are the quickest to transform their middle management layers will attract future talent and unleash the potential of everyone, creating organisational cultures that invite, see and acknowledge the talents and contributions of all.
About the Authors
Dominic Ashley-Timms and Laura Ashley-Timms are the CEO and COO of performance consultancy Notion, creators of the multi-award-winning STAR® Manager programme, and authors of the management bestseller The Answer is a Question: The Missing Superpower that Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and Leader.
#UKs #Poor #Quality #Management #Costs #Billion #AnnuallyHeres